Lousiana Hotshot

it seemed, could be trusted on the subject of her father. She closed her eyes in frustration, and immediately felt sick, felt something the size of a porpoise leap out of her stomach and into her throat, something slimy and thrashing. Something she recognized.
    It was fear.
    The world in front of her, the backs of her eyelids, turned red. She snapped them open, but it didn’t help. She felt as if her body was swaying, as if she might fall. She closed them again, against the disorientation, and she was a child, almost a baby. Someone was lying on the floor on an old rag rug, bleeding from the chest, and there was an ancient red upholstered chair in the room. The loudest noise she’d ever heard echoed in her ears.
    The memory— if it was that— flitted so quickly away she had only the vaguest impression of the person on the floor, but the room was vivid. And the fear was monstrous. The leaping porpoise had grown quickly to the size of a whale, and it was no longer in her throat, but had liquefied and seeped into her cells, contaminating them and making it impossible to focus, even to…
    She felt a steadying hand on her back. “Are you all right, Miss?”
    She turned to look at the good Samaritan, a white man. “I think so. I…”
    The look on the man’s face stopped her cold. “Put your head down,” he said. “Head on your knees.” He helped her lower it. She wondered if she was going to throw up.
    But in fact she felt better in a moment, and the man, holding the back of her neck, let her up. “Are you ill?” he asked.
    She faked a smile. “I’m fine, I think.” She held up her cup. “Too much sugar in my coffee. Thanks for your help. I’m okay. Really.”
    He said she was welcome, and walked away frowning, as if he didn’t feel his work with her was done.
    And truth be told, she still felt shaky.
I was there,
she thought.
I saw him die. And I wasn’t any two, either. I had to be seven. Why’d Corey tell me two?
    Why, in fact, had anyone told her anything, even that she should keep her nose out if it? They were trying to protect her, she knew that, but from what? Not just the memory of her father bleeding, though that was plenty.
    More than that.
    Talba thought about it hard, and tried to come to terms with the notion that her mother might be a murderer. She wondered how to research it. First the newspaper, she thought, but there must be something else. Police records? Could she ask Skip Langdon?
    No, she could not. No way in hell. And she was suddenly aware that she wasn’t going to look it up in any newspaper files, either. She was going to forget about it. She hated to admit it, but they’d been right, the whole damn batch of them. She was wrong to pry into this thing, and she was going to drop it.
    If Miz Clara had shot her husband, she must have had a damn good reason.
    Was it about me?
she thought, remembering her worry that he’d molested her, that that was what the silence was all about.
    If it was, she didn’t want to know.

Chapter 17
    Eddie was in the office early, even before Eileen, having slept barely at all. Listening to Audrey cry like that, knowing he couldn’t go to her, was probably the hardest thing he ever had to do. It made him think of something else almost as bad— the time the maid had called him at work and told him to meet Audrey at the emergency room.
    When he got there, he could hear his son screaming behind walls and curtains, stranded somewhere in a labyrinth of treatment rooms he couldn’t have navigated even if he’d managed to penetrate the shield of bureaucracy that was the first hurdle.
    The boy had been five, stricken with acute appendicitis, but at the time Eddie didn’t know that, knew only that his son was in agony somewhere that Eddie couldn’t go. It was the first time he realized how much he loved his son, how crazy he’d go if anything happened to him.
    It was the night he’d taken the vow, too.
The vow. The pledge.
He’d completely forgotten. And that was what this whole ten-year thing was all about.
    He thought about that. He’d forgotten the thing this was all about, the thing that was so important it had kept him from speaking to his son for a decade.
    He could get mystical about that, if he let himself, his taking the vow, never being able to break it, then forgetting it, and now Anthony back and Audrey reminding him of it with her crying. There were people who’d say things about it being meant to be and everything happening for a